


Azula's Inferno

by rvd1945



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Fire is life, Gen, JoJo Elements, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:54:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23458141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rvd1945/pseuds/rvd1945
Summary: It had been forty years since the Agni Kai, and Azula had learned so much in her short life.It didn’t show on her face; in fact, there wasn’t a single wrinkle. Not a single grey hair. She imagined sometimes that if Mai was there, she would be completely overwrought with jealousy. Her old friend looked more and more haggard as time went on, and Agni she missed her best friends, although she knew with a hardening, blackening heart that they surely didn’t miss her back. No, life went on without the Fire Princess tearing through their lives. It made her sad, and on some days, absolutely miserable, but she would survive.She always did.(TL;DR Azula is reborn as Helen Potter. The Philosopher's Stone is actually the Red Stone of Aja. NOT a crackfic.)
Relationships: Azula/Mai (Avatar), Draco Malfoy/Hermione Granger, Pansy Parkinson/Harry Potter
Comments: 6
Kudos: 54





	1. Ground Zero

It had been forty years since the Agni Kai, and Azula had learned so much in her short life.

It didn’t show on her face; in fact, there wasn’t a single wrinkle. Not a single grey hair. She imagined sometimes that if Mai was there, she would be completely overwrought with jealousy. Her old friend looked more and more haggard as time went on, and _Agni_ she missed her best friends, although she knew with a hardening, blackening heart that they surely didn’t miss her back. No, life went on without the Fire Princess tearing through their lives. It made her sad, and on some days, absolutely miserable, but she would survive.

She always did.

She wondered if Uncle Iroh would have been impressed that she had killed the two remaining dragons with her own lightning, after figuring out all that they might have taught her and more in a scant three years of captivity and quiet contemplation. After she had figured out how to burn the poison Ty Lee had dosed her with out of her system--the breathing fire trick worked _really_ well with the gaseous mercury destroying her brain--there had been _a lot_ of that.

She had a lot of figuring out to do, she realised. Without the constant weight of her father’s expectations and the constant strain of his nightly _attentions_ weighing on her mind, she felt, for the first time in her life, free. And Agni if that wasn’t absolutely fucking terrifying.

She had been so many things in her life, since losing the throne and leaving her haunting and miserable past behind. She had known things she had never known even in captivity. She had known hunger. She had known crushing poverty. She had learned what it was to kill over a scrap of bread. That had been the first year, crouching and squatting in the alleys of Ba Sing Se. She had been a mercenary, unable to pick up a new form of bending, but able to learn the rudiments of earthbending up through metalbending, which, while still in its infancy, could be revolutionised if she only had the ability to make the _fucking_ rock move. She hoped she was reborn as an earthbender, if only to diversify her spiritual portfolio.

Anyway, that was year two. It wasn’t until year five that she came upon the epiphany that her inner fire was not separate from the flame of her life--it _was_ the flame of her life. She sought out the guru, Pathik, at the turn of year five into year six. She spent the better part of year six in philosophical discussion and debate, and while most of what he said was either things she had either already learned on her own, or the basest, most commonplace sophistry, she conceded that he had a few good points. And though he insisted that what she was trying to do was impossible for anyone but the Avatar, she knew that he was wrong; that the life’s flame could be taken to its fullest extent, and used to manipulate life itself.

It was year seven when she finally made her way to the Sun Warriors’ ancient city. She was then determined to take her life’s flame to its zenith, to continue pushing her limits until the fire burned away everything that made her chest ache with loneliness, that made her cry herself to sleep some nights with no one there to hear. It was an ordeal, to fight through the entire city, only then to be confronted with not one, but two dragons, but it was nothing compared to the actual battle at the temple. For twelve days she fought, without food or water, sustaining herself with her life’s flame alone, before she smote both wyrms upon the mountainside. She fell from the mountain then, her life’s flame almost guttered out, thinking that this was the end.

It was a Water Tribe ship that rescued her, told her about Republic City, and the rebuilding efforts the glorious Firelord Zuko was putting into place alongside that brat who had the impudence to not _stay dead,_ Avatar Aang. She was _so_ tempted to just burn the whole monument to hubris, to raze it until so much ash remained, but she restrained herself. Such an outburst was beneath her. She had risen beyond being simply fire incarnate, on the cusp of ascension to something… _more._

She spent the next decade and a half as a wanderer, a healer, and a hermit, simply chasing that _more._ She learned how to manipulate the life’s flame in others, how to imbue them with firebending if she so chose, and all without the cheap trick the Avatar had used against Ozai.

It wasn’t until the advent of the third decade that she felt ready to confront Ozai. Of course, by that point, he was most assuredly dead. What she confronted, then, was not _him._ She would allow him to poison her mind and violate her body no longer. Instead, she set about untangling the tangled skein of emotions and preconceived notions that rose in her throat like bile whenever she thought of her father. Her cold, unfeeling, perpetually frightened father. She learned to hate the man, and then moved past hatred, becoming utterly indifferent to him. And while that took away her pain and suffering related to that wound, she could feel her individuality slipping quickly, knew that this was like a drug, and that if she continued down this path, she would lose herself, and the bluish-green flame that burned bright within her would be subsumed in a sea of mediocre red-orange. While the Avatar might have been fine with foregoing his individuality, she guarded her identity _very_ vehemently, thank you very much.

She had followers for a time, people who wished to learn how she healed. They had no idea who she was, and it wasn’t because they didn’t recognize her, no; simply that with the discovery of the manipulation of her life’s flame, her aging had slowed to a crawl after she turned nineteen, and then halted entirely somewhere between twenty-one or twenty-five. By this point, it was thirty years since the end of the Great War, and there was _no way_ the ‘Once and Future Fire Lady’--and hadn’t _that_ been a fun read--could still only be in her early twenties. No, more likely it was just some young girl who looked her spitting image, or some spirit in disguise. These followers came to her from all walks of life, benders and non-benders alike. She turned most of the benders away, angering them, no doubt, to the point where at several points in her fourth decade, she worried about having to leave her hermitage for fear of reprisal for some imagined crime the idiots in Republic City certainly dreamed up to keep those who thought themselves strong in their stratified ivory towers of artificial power; however, the villagers from whom she got most of her supplies were loyal to a man, thinking her Raava made flesh, and hadn’t _that_ been funny. She had met Raava once before, and was…‘unimpressed’ was putting it lightly. So she never had to move.

The firebenders and non-benders were the best of them. The Water Tribesmen, by far the worst. It was the latter group she always turned away; no base healer stuck in their ways could ever comprehend the hungry, consuming nature of flame. The firebenders were at least respectful about it when they realised that they could not learn what she meant to teach them. The non-benders were the most malleable, and she taught them, while not everything, enough to make them secret thorns in the side of the established order of Republic City for years to come. She wondered how Zuzu would react, knowing that even now she plotted against this carefully built illusion, this gilded cage that he had crafted in his painful naivete, but now only incidentally while on the journey to share her wisdom with the world. And yes, she counted herself as wise. She even wrote a book on it. The _Hamon no Sho,_ she called it. The Book of Ripples.

And now, here she was, on her back, awaiting death. Fearing that she had learned all she could in the material world, she induced a drug-fuelled stupour in her physical body and had the _bright_ idea of challenging the source of all bending to an Agni Kai. Finally, her life’s flame had guttered out, and she died now, not from being beaten, but from being overpowered. The amounts of sheer power that coursed through the ancient lion-turtle’s spiritual form were staggering in their absolute enormity. No, not even he could contest her unrivalled mastery of herself and her life’s flame. Instead, he had had to resort to raw power. She was thus thoroughly disenchanted, disappointed, _let down_ by how all the things in the material and spirit worlds seemed content to wallow in their mediocrity, never to truly _change_ or _revolutionise._ It was then that she realised the answer to the greatest riddle of all--why firebending was seen as solely destructive, even by the wisest of men, when it could do _so much more._

Change. Moreso even than water, that was the nature of fire. Constant, flowing change. Unlike water, which was gentle, but insistent, fire was… _hungry._ It consumed and left in its wake the quintessence, the very _k_ _ū_ , or quintessence, of creation. To embrace the truth of Fire was to begin to comprehend Void, for what was Fire but Void brought to motion?

These men were afraid of change, of meteoric, unceasing progress, unsure of what that might mean. In that way, they were all just the same as Ozai.

_Pathetic._

It was at that point that she allowed herself to go. To burn out, and not to fade away.

* * *

Helen Potter. That was her new name. She learned it when she began primary school. That had been the end of _that_ relationship with the Dursleys. She had been willing to suffer them because dealing with them was beneath her. But now, she was _insulted._ Not only were they just as malicious and scared of her as Ozai had been, but they were _stupid_ about it. She considered snuffing out the flames of their lives to be a service to the gene pool. Not even any ash to clean up. But when she realised that _somebody_ had stacked the deck against her, she cut her losses, folded, and left the table. She was five when her original body had picked up firebending, and though she wasn’t nearly as healthy anymore, she could afford to start slow. After all, on _this_ planet, where all the _sensible_ people were in the East, and in the West, there were only mewling sophists attempting to paw their way into some semblance of an understanding of power and how it worked, she wasn’t Princess Azula of the Fire Nation anymore. She wasn’t a hunted woman anymore. 

She was five when she put her old thieving skills into practise, stealing enough food as raw materials to kindle the ember of her life’s flame once more into a roaring, pale, sickly green inferno. The blue had entirely burnt out with her last life, and now what remained was the same light that was the first thing she saw when she hit Ground Zero in this body. She lamented its loss as the loss of an immutable part of herself, certainly, but she moved on. Reincarnation came with loss, she supposed, the same as it came with gains. Her hair was no longer as annoyingly silky, and in the moment it took to think that, she cursed the fact that she hadn’t taken the time to work through her issues with Ursa, and now it was too late; the trauma was carved onto the face of her soul. And then she remembered what had almost happened when she had worked past caring about Ozai, and remembered that her individuality was worth the pain--that relief from the pain brought the flame of her life that much closer to the neverending abyssal morass that was mediocrity. Her eyes were not that easily-identifiable shade of gold anymore, but rather were an emerald hue. Her facial structure was softer, more girlish than the defined austerity of a Fire Nation Princess, though her flesh, while pale and milky now, was certainly still just as perfect as it had been that fateful day at the Boiling Rock, when she lost her friends, and the woman she was beginning to reconcile as quite possibly the love of her life.

But no, Mai was gone. As was Ty Lee. There was nothing left for her back there but ashes. Her friends left her behind to live their own best lives, to be their own best selves, and even though it still hurt, still broke her heart, she had to leave them be. Nothing would get Mai to look at her the way she looked at Zuko, after all. She had seen images of Mai afterwards. She had really blossomed into a proper Fire Lady. Azula had been proud; Helen still was.

The one person she had never expected to see, however, found her on the way to London.

* * *

The one good thing about Little Whinging was that it was in Surrey, which was but a few days’ walk from London. London, being a larger city than even Ba Sing Se, would be an easy place to submerge herself and survive until she was back to fighting strength. This was the plan that Helen felt as she entered the city along the banks of the Thames. Better that way to avoid the authorities who would question her entire being, from her threadbare attire to the fact that her now-bare feet were far from frostbitten, being along the bank of a major river in the dead of winter. She was aware that she couldn’t talk to them about being the practitioner of a martial art that not only allowed her to undergo any mortification, but also enabled her to endlessly regenerate damage so long as she had raw materials with which to do so, so she thought it best to avoid them.

It wasn’t until she had been in London for three days that someone finally found her. 

“Well, well. What have we here?” asked a youthful, masculine voice. The tone was one she normally associated with someone long dead, but as she looked up, it was as though she had seen a ghost.

It wasn’t his hair or his features; the man had long since left them behind as she had left hers in the distance, or so she supposed. Nor was it even his eyes, though those were easily indicators. No, it was an aura about him, the way the flame of his life flickered and, dare she say it, rippled, that caused her immediate distress.

“And how are you? Come in. You must be cold.”

“Don’t _fuck_ with me, Uncle. I’m _really_ not in the mood.”

“Language, young… Wait, you _know_ who I am?!”

Helen snorted. “I would dignify that with a response, but you’re correct. I’m cold, hungry, in desperate need of a bath and clean clothes, and have a sudden urge to teach you how to make good tea. So, where are you staying, Iroh?”

“It’s actually Severus these days,” he replied.

“Helen,” she returned.

“You know, I expected Zuko would pop up, but not you.”

“Zuzu’s around somewhere being an idiot, I’m certain,” Helen sighed as she stood from her perch and motioned for Uncle Iroh, now Severus, to lead on. The man was taller than he had been, and thinner, leaner. It seemed that he was back to his old shape from before Ba Sing Se and the death of Lu Ten. His eyes were dark, and his hair was long and black. He wore a black suit that hung off of his almost skeletal frame. All in all, he looked far more the skeleton than the rotund old man he had once been. The Dragon of the West had fallen far, it seemed. But not _so_ far that he forgot what it was to be himself, to be a man in his own paradigm. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“Did you know that trauma has a way of awakening past lives?” said Severus instead. “What trauma did you go through to awaken once more, Helen?”

“There was a flash of pale green light, and then I was suddenly in a baby girl’s body,” Helen said, resigning herself to her former uncle’s evasive nature.

“A flash of…” He stopped in his place, and wheeled around, his black eyes blazing. “ _The Killing Curse…_ Helen, show me your forehead!”

Helen, knowing that the only way out of this was to humour the old man, lifted up her long raven bangs, and showed the lightning bolt scar emblazoned onto her forehead.

“ _...Oh._ ” Severus then whirled around and walked away, and Helen had the unfortunate task of keeping pace with the much taller, much older man.

Severus didn’t speak a word to her until some time after they got to his apartment. The bottom floor was home to a tea shop, the Jade Dragon, predictably. There were attractive and middlingly-attractive women of all ages walking in and out of it, from small children to withered crones. But looking in their eyes, she saw something she thought she would never again have to see outside of a mirror.

Each of them knew what it was to suffer a man’s tender mercies.

As soon as the door closed behind them, Helen stared directly at Severus as he made his way around the area. She had seen reports of the Eastern Air Temple, and with all the alembics, retorts, cauldrons, calcinators, and mortars and pestles, many of which were bubbling and spitting, spewing fumes high into the air, she imagined that this was what it must have looked like. Tearing her eyes from the setup, she crossed her arms over her chest, and said, “I don’t believe you’ve told me just _why_ you’ve set up shop for so many prostitutes.”

“I don’t know if I _owe_ you an explanation, _princess,_ ” he spat without thinking. Helen, her eyes gaining flecks of gold as the old Azula reared her insane head, merely cocked an eyebrow, rested her back against the wall, and glared at him.

“You owe me a hell of a lot more than an explanation, _Iroh._ You _left_ me. You _knew_ how much of a monster Ozai was, and you never _once_ thought about what he did to me while the rest of the palace slept. After all, even a man consumed by hatred knows what it is to feel _lust,_ ” Azula spat, and the old bitterness ran high in her.

Severus-Iroh deflated slightly. “I…I didn’t know… I know I failed you…”

Azula snorted, and it wasn’t a good sound. “Save me the self-serving excuses. You didn’t _fail_ me. You _gave up_ on me. _Abandoned me._ ‘You didn’t know…’ You knew damn well, don’t _fucking_ lie to me. Now, start paying your debt, or we can have an Agni Kai right here, right now, and I doubt anyone will notice.”

“You wouldn’t win.”

“ _Try me._ ”

Severus sighed and looked at his equipment. Worrying his lower lip for a moment, he turned back to her. “Would you like some tea?”

Azula settled, and Helen was firmly back. “ _I’ll_ prepare the tea. _You_ get explaining.”

Severus bowed his head and slipped into his seat next to the bar of the kitchenette. Azula went over and began to use firebending to boil the water. She still didn’t trust petrol. It smelled too much like a charnel house for her tastes.

“You know we have a boiler…”

“Bending fire to heat tea water gives it character. Makes for a more voluminous and layered tea,” replied Helen.

“The Jade Dragon doubles as a halfway house. A place where women of the night of all ages and walks of life can come to safely seek retirement before their lives end on their backs,” explained Severus. The reasoning was so _Iroh_ that it nearly made her choke on her own spit in mirth.

“Nursing a bit of a guilt complex there, are you, Uncle?”

“You have _no_ idea,” Severus sighed. “There was a woman I once loved, your mother, Lily. She ended up marrying someone who made my life a living hell.”

“I know what that’s like,” Helen sighed. “How do you think I felt when Mai finally married Zuzu?”

“Zuko is a good man--”

She snorted. “Zuzu is a naive idiot. _Was_ a naive idiot. Mai deserved more.”

“More than him, or more than you?”

Azula wanted to burn half his face off, see if that greasy black hair was as flammable as it looked. Helen, however, just shrugged. “I don’t know. Just… _more._ ”

“To be honest, I think your friend Ty Lee and I were the only ones who noticed how you pined for that girl,” Severus chuckled. “It gave me hope.”

“Not enough, it seemed,” replied Azula spitefully. Then Helen sighed. “Where do you keep the powdered lotus extract?”

“...what?”

“In my later years, before I turned fifty, I used to imbibe lotus root tea. It…helped with the nightmares. But I don’t think either of us can handle pure lotus root in our current states. So the powdered lotus extract will have to do.”

“I don’t think I ever tried medicinal teas…”

“Yes, well, when you’re the victim of a pathetic hateful waste of flesh’s attentions for the better part of your teenage years, tea making turns from a hobby to a necessity if you wish to keep your sanity intact.”

“You _are_ aware that lotus root is poison?”

“And you’re trying to tell me that the famed Dragon of the West never learned to purge impurities from his body?” Helen remarked incredulously.

“Such a thing is impossible.”

Helen shrugged. “Not really. Mercury is liquid at room temperature. Just up it to its boiling point, and the gas can be directed through your body or out of your pores. Must be, actually, for the healing process to begin. After that, it’s simply a matter of practise.”

“When were you exposed to mercury?!”

“Ty Lee dosed me with it at the Boiling Rock. It kept me from killing Mai, so I can’t say I’m not grateful.” She shrugged. “Such is life, I’m afraid. Betrayal and abandonment. You kill and kill and kill, until there is nothing left. Just you, and the memory of your sin.”

“Do you regret it?” he asked softly.

She snorted again. “Do I _look_ like a mewling sophist whelp? No. No. Serve, save, slave, slay… I’ve got sins aplenty, but regrets? Not so much.”

Severus nodded. “Then you are further along the path than I am. I…still see Lu Ten’s face in my dreams.”

“Mm,” replied Helen, slipping into the walk-in closet and taking the powdered lotus extract off of the shelf. She sprinkled some into the infuser like it was matcha, and went about reproducing the tea ceremony. “So, tell me about this world. Start with why I’m an orphan.”

“A thanatophobe did his level best to take over the country during the early to mid nineteen-eighties,” Severus summarised. “His name was Tom Riddle, but most people know him as Lord Voldemort. ‘Flight-from-death,’ when translated. He was incredibly powerful, but his fear of death curtailed him. He killed your parents, and when he tried to kill you, something made his Killing Curse, a spell that separates the soul from the body by force, rebound and annihilate him. The colour of the Killing Curse is a pale green.”

“ _That_ must have been what awakened me.”

“Indeed,” replied Severus wryly. “Of course, no one can fight a war alone…”

“Except for me,” she interjected.

He smiled. “Yes, except for you. Ba Sing Se was a masterstroke. But regardless, as he _isn’t_ you, he was in point of fact not alone. He managed to bring together a group of like-minded nobles who wished to eradicate ‘impure blood’ from the world, and used their money and resources to wage a war of terror across the British Isles.”

“‘Impure blood.’ Sounds like a load of sophistry to me.”

“Is that your new favourite word?” chided Severus, and Helen flushed, moving instead to serve the tea now that it had fully steeped. Severus took a sip of it, and groaned. “I have not had tea this good since the day I died.”  
“And even before that, I’d wager. The lotus grows only in swamps, you know. Of which the Earth Kingdom is quite firmly bereft,” said Helen in a clipped tone. “And no. I just find myself using it more and more often because every philosopher around me seems to be a pretentious prick. So I call them sophists to save on syllables.”

Severus laughed. “Well then, you at least have a reason for it. So, what’s your plan for here?”

Helen shrugged. “Don’t really have one. I’m pretty sick and tired of how no one seems to even _want_ to reach out and grasp their true potential. As far as I’m aware, that’s why the lion turtles struck me down.”

“The lion turtles are not in the business of striking people down. What did you do to earn their ire?”

“Somewhere between killing the last two dragons on the planet” --Severus winced at this-- “and setting up as a monk somewhere in the hinterlands of the Earth Kingdom, I decided that in order to reach my true potential, I would have to lend the flame of my life its fullest brilliance. So I wrote a book, trained a few lifebenders, and then drugged my way into the Spirit World. It took, what, sixteen hours for them to actually overpower me? Or maybe they were just holding back. I don’t know and I don’t care. Time dilates in the Spirit World, as I’m sure you well know. It was annoying, to say the least.”

“You...killed them?”

“They wasted my time!” she whined. “I go all the way there to find out how Zuzu was able to defeat me, only to find that what he had was a new firebending form and a new philosophy, which I had figured out _while in captivity._ Do you have _any_ idea how much of a _disappointment_ that was?

“Anyway, it took me twelve days, but I did it. It was for the best. Better they be defeated as the creatures of legend that they were, than by one of Republic City’s technological terrors.” Helen shrugged. “I spared them that indignity. I could go back and retract that kindness, but then who’s the _real_ villain, hmm?”

Severus, still looking disturbed, took another sip of his tea. His hand was shaking as he considered the fact that his great kindness was undone. “Was it… _really_ necessary?”

She sighed, and suddenly wasn’t certain it was Helen or Azula who brought that forth from her. “You didn’t see what the world was becoming. What… _mediocrity_ was rising from the ashes of the Great War. Instead of being granted bending, the non-benders were beginning to demand that bending be taken from those who were born with it, the gift of the spirits. How on earth are we supposed to be able to find gold when the lesser metals have transmuted everything to pewter? I ask you. But yes, the dragons, being the source of firebending, would have been slain by these so-called ‘Equalists’ eventually. It was an inevitability. I could have fought the tide, but then I would have drowned in it. It didn’t matter _how_ powerful I was.”

“Oh. Well hopefully the Avatar…”

“The Avatar is a _child._ A child who is enchanted with the idea of eternal peace, not realising that conflict is a necessity of life, nature, and the world,” said Helen with exasperation. “One look at what he did to Ozai, what horrific technique he unleashed on the world so as to avoid getting his pretty little Air Nomad hands dirty, and you see how willfully ignorant and naive he is.

“The Avatar doesn’t get to have hang-ups. Doesn’t get to have ideals. They are Raava’s tool, nothing more. Their _only_ purpose is to keep the balance, not to enforce their sanctimonious hypocrisies upon the rest of the planet. I don’t think it’s hyperbole or exaggeration to say that Aang is indeed the _worst_ Avatar we’ve had since before Wan.”

“Wan was the first Avatar, though.”

“That’s the point,” said Helen, as she sipped once more at her tea, her lips curled into a humourless, mirthless smile. “By taking away the bending of one man, he has committed a greater crime than even Sozin with his genocide of the Air Nomads. At least Sozin only wiped out _one_ nation. _Aang_ has put in the hands of the sheep the means to wipe out the _entire bending populace._ _That_ is your legacy, Uncle. The slow decline and destruction of the entire world. It has been dealt a crippling blow, and will continue to _limp on_ until someone that we no longer have the means to combat puts it out of its misery. _That_ is what you and your White Lotus have wrought.”

Helen looked around and realised she was quite far forth in her chair, and so she sat back and finished off her lotus tea. “So. Where will I be sleeping?”

Severus was very quiet for a very long time. Then he looked over to Helen, and it was as though he was seeing her for the first time. “Perhaps _you_ ought to have been Avatar, then. From the brief time I spent with Aang, I can tell you he had nowhere near the concrete vision of the future that you seem to possess.”

Helen shrugged. “What’s done is done.”

“Indeed…” Severus sighed. “I have a number of guest bedrooms throughout the building. I actually own and maintain the property. Take your pick of rooms, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Hai,” she replied, standing and bowing at the waist before walking out of the apartment.

* * *

Severus sat there in silence. As Iroh, he had never been too set in his ways. He had always been willing to find a new perspective. Which was why Az-- _Helen’s_ pronouncement that he had doomed the world he had called home for the better part of a century shook him to the core. And the vehemence in her gaze… He normally would have taken anything Azula said with an even pound of salt, but something about the belief in her… He had given up because he had thought her irredeemable, fire incarnate, who had burned away all extraneous things, like love and emotion, in order to become the greatest killing machine to ever stalk the world. At twelve, she had believed in nothing, was focused on one thing to the exclusion of all else--the pursuit of victory. But now he saw that flame burning, no longer a cold blue, but a multitude of hues; not to mention, she now made _excellent_ tea. She had found her balance, and in that balance, she said in no uncertain terms something the shadows of his mind had been fearing ever since he first showed up here.

He had failed Azula, and he had failed his world.

He went into the corner of his room and began to light a candle before the painting of Lu Ten he had done. And next to it, the painting of Lily Potter. 

He took out his sheet music--composition being one of the few hobbies he enjoyed--and began furiously marking notes, time signatures, ties, chords, and rhythmic notations. It was to be for the piano, and it was to be Azula’s song. A lament for what she had lost--and perhaps, a celebration of what she had yet to find. 

He resolved, then, to teach her the instrument, to teach her music and dance, to give her all the things Ozai should have instead of the pain he gave. But that would not be enough. His godson, Draco, was showing signs of the insurgence of Zuko’s soul, and his betrothed, if Severus wasn’t simply thinking wishfully, was someone that Helen would never have expected.

Yes, he had failed Azula. But he _refused_ to fail Helen.

The next day, he took Helen to piano lessons at Malfoy Manor, knowing that Lucius, who was showing more and more Ozai-like traits, was away. Narcissa Malfoy would be a wonderful figure to help Helen figure out what she had never learned as Azula, like how to act outside of war, how to _function_ when not constantly striving for a higher echelon. He timed it so that she could meet her brother’s reincarnation, as well as a certain someone.

Upon walking into the small little conservatory area set up in the solar of Malfoy Manor, Severus found himself swiftly tackled. There was Draco, his nephew by intent if not by blood. “Uncle Severus, did you bring me anything?!”

“I brought you a new friend,” he said. “Meet Helen.”

With that, he stepped aside and showed Helen, whose hair had been meticulously tamed and potioned into a topknot with a flaming coronet set into it. Her emerald eyes gazed analytically around the room, taking care to keep her bangs covering her scar, but when they alighted upon one person in particular, those eyes widened to the size of saucers. 

“Draco! Be polite!” came a young girl’s voice, punching the boy in the shoulder. The young girl then curtseyed. “My name is Pansy Parkinson. It’s nice to make your acquaintance, Helen…”

“...Mai?” Helen breathed.

“Helen Mai? That’s a name I haven’t heard before, I’m afraid.”

“Her name is Potter. Helen Veronica Potter,” Severus corrected.

“Potter? Like, the Girl Who Lived?” asked Draco. “The half-blood?”

Upon hearing the accusation, Helen’s eyes zeroed in on Draco, and the smirk on her face was all Azula. “Why yes. And I take it you’re the inbred blood purist whose wand will probably be all the larger to compensate for his miniscule endowment and inferior intellect.”

She bowed. “You may address me as Helen, but one more word about my lineage and I burn you to cinders.”

“You can’t do that! You don’t have a wand!” 

In response, Helen-Azula snapped her fingers and a pale green flame the colour of the killing curse sprung into existence. “I can’t? Are you certain? No one told _me_.”

Looking for a way to diffuse the situation, he was saved when Lady Narcissa swept into the room, her black robes flowing in a way that Severus could only imitate. When _he_ did it, he looked like a bat. When _she_ did it, it was like the flowing and sinuous motions of a dragon. “That’s enough playtime, children. Find your seats.”

Helen snuffed the flame out before her eyes narrowed at the woman. Severus sighed and clasped her on the shoulder. Narcissa really did appear to be just like Ursa, albeit with an ethnicity change and a bad dye job. He hadn’t expected this, but perhaps this would be a learning experience for young Helen. A way to provide closure.

Then Lady Malfoy sat down at the piano, and Helen’s mask was firmly in place. The same mask she wore at court, of cool superiority. But Severus was not worried; he had seen beneath that mask now, and knew there was more beneath it than an affection-starved little girl. Severus patted her on the shoulder, and she went off to the seat beside the Parkinson girl. He then bowed, and exited stage left. His job, for now at least, was done.

Avoiding Dobby, he slipped right through the Floo and back to his apartment. Opening the doors of the Jade Dragon, he began to furiously brew tea. For the first time in a long time, however, he believed that he had hope.

Hope for a redemption that did not include Albus Dumbledore. 


	2. The Music Lesson

It had been decades since the last time Azula had had a music lesson--a living weapon had no need to learn to play an instrument. Needless to say, Helen had never had one. Thus Helen relied on her memories as Azula, fuzzy though they were, of learning to play the zither. The piano was a different animal entirely; in many ways, it was easier, but in others it was all but impossible. At this juncture, at least. But she at least kept abreast of music theory, so she knew a lot of what Lady Malfoy was talking about when she started speaking of scales, keys, and intervals. It irked her when she began speaking of pure and dissonant intervals, as though the pure intervals were somehow more desirable. She remembered that Fire Nation music theory was just starting to break into how to make dissonance sibilant when she left the island, and sometimes her followers would play her this new type of music from Republic City called  _ jazz,  _ of all things. She knew, then, of tritones, and was herself fond of odd time signatures. Her favourite song of the genre,  _ Caravan,  _ was written in 7/4, after all, and if that wasn’t an odd time signature, she didn’t know what was. 

So when it was their time to start to play the scales, Helen was bored out of her mind. Pansy didn’t seem to wish to speak to her since she threatened to fry Draco to a crisp. She had no idea what  _ that  _ was about. Lady Malfoy chose her to go first. She sat at the piano, looking at the black and white keys, and decided to try to go with the flow.

_ And why are we doing that? _

She jumped. That was a voice the origin of which she did not know.  _ Who are you? _

_ It’s not important. What  _ is  _ important is impressing Mai’s reincarnation, isn’t it? _

_ I suppose… _

_ Good. Then repeat after me. _

“This is a classic where I come from. It’s called  _ Sing, Sing, Sing, _ ” said Helen at the voice’s behest. She sighed and put her fingers down on the keys, and closed her eyes. Suddenly, rushing beneath her eyelids was… _ sheet music. _

_ 4/4 cuttime, to start. Simpler than  _ Caravan _ , isn’t it? _

_ Yes, it is.  _ Helen sighed.  _ I can do this. _

_ Forte, half measure rest, flat that B note, and for Agni’s sake, keep that bass line moving. _

Helen nodded, and with renewed confidence, the sheet music in her mind’s eye, she started playing. It started moderately, but when the melody kicked in, it and her fingers went into high gear. She was utterly focused on what she was doing, knowing that the moment she lost her focus, she was done for. Her fingers flew over the keys, and in an upbeat mood, she managed to keep her tempo consistent, as though the voice was acting the metronome behind her. Of course, she didn’t start the singing part; replicating the entire orchestra that should have been behind her on this single piano was almost beyond her on its own.

Six minutes later, the song was over.

_ Now remember, no matter what they say, you were perfect. _

Helen nodded to herself, as she stood and bowed.

When she looked up at the adult in the room, the look of horror on her face alone was almost enough to make it worth it. The hatred that Azula had felt towards Ursa now simmered. And this woman, who looked so much like Ursa, down to the flame of her life, the light of her soul, was the target of her ire right now.

“Well...that was certainly something. Where did you say you were from, Miss Potter?” asked Lady Malfoy.

“Surrey,” replied she. “Music theory has come a long way since the advent of  _ Greensleeves,  _ Lady Malfoy. I simply wished to elucidate that.”

“Well, I…um…”

But Helen was already flowing back to her seat, fire and water, two poles, both represented in her quintessence. She sat down on the chair, now one far away from Pansy, and breathed a sigh, taking care to make it look like she was satisfied with herself. When in reality, it broke her heart anew to see one whose soul shone with the same light as her love’s begin to pull away from her. It was enough to draw a guru into despair. But she hardened her heart, and instead began to do her breathing exercises--fire, after all, begins with the breath, with the  _ absence  _ of breath, the vacuum bringing all into motion.

It wasn’t long before the music lesson was at last over, and they all stood and thanked Lady Malfoy as their pureblood parents came to pick them up. Lords Nott, Crabbe, Goyle, and Parkinson all came together, and their heirs left with them.

Until all that was left was her, Draco, and Narcissa. Draco smirked, and all too quickly Zuko’s same cruel smile, left behind after she outpaced him in firebending, flashed before her eyes. She saw red, then, knowing that she had lost Mai once again, missed her second chance, missed her ability to be a normal girl…

“Should have known you’d play piano like a filthy mudblood.”

“Draco!”

“Agn… Honour Duel, right now. Outside,” said Azula, and now her Helen persona was firmly stuffed in a chest in the corner of the room of her mind, while all she wanted to do was to finish the job Ozai had begun. Before the child or the adult could reply, she wheeled about and walked out of the room. She stemmed the tide of her childish tears with something approaching disgust. Princesses didn’t cry, after all.

They went out into the courtyard, Zuko, Ursa and Azula. Or at least, that was what her mind was registering them as. It wasn’t in their countenances as much as it was in their stances, after all. She looked them up and down and could see only a much younger version of her older brother, now of an age with her, without the scar, looking blond and beautiful and oh so very inbred. And next to him was the poorly-hidden English countenance of the mother who thought her a monster and  _ left  _ her,  _ left  _ them both with a father who never cared, or, in her case… She didn’t finish the thought for fear of vomiting. 

Before long, a man came home, and he was the  _ spitting image  _ of Ozai. Oh, certainly his hair was blond, his eyes green, but the set of his jaw, the cool, unfeeling superiority in his eyes… The fear she knew to be lurking beneath that disdainful gaze caused her no shortage of disgust.

“Lucius!” called Narcissa, and the older Malfoy glided over to them, his robes not even alighting upon the ground.

“What is it, Narcissa?”

“Draco’s having his first honour duel.”

“Oh? With whom? Crabbe? Goyle? Nott?”

“No… It’s with the Potter girl. Severus brought her.”

“Oh. Well then, this ought to be entertaining. Come, my son. Show the half-blood brat what a pureblood heir is capable of. You may use my wand for this.”

“Really?!” cried Draco, and it was such a Zuko exclamation she could spit.

“Of course. It’s not every day that you have your first honour duel, and against such an  _ esteemed  _ personnage, as well.” Lucius handed Draco a long, thin stick she knew from her talks with her uncle to be a wand. She didn’t have one, but she didn’t need one, and when Narcissa proffered her own, she glared at the woman until Lady Malfoy retreated to the sidelines.

“Now, I don’t know how your mudblood friends do it, but first…”

“Just stop with the pedantry and bow already,” Azula sighed. She bowed herself, and was gratified to see Draco doing the same thing. She slipped into her stance sinuously, and kindled her inner flame, feeding it her focus, her determination, her rage--her very will to live. The pale green flame erupted into a raging inferno, and smoke began to flow from her nostrils and from between her lips as she smirked.

Draco took his own stance with his borrowed wand, and the instant he began to move, his wand flailing about in strange motions, she ducked beneath a flying bolt of energy she assumed to have been a spell. Lashing herself back forward like a whip, she belched an enormous torrent of bright green fire out of her mouth. 

When he threw up a shield to protect himself from the fire, Draco was not expecting her to leap above it, nor was he looking for her to arc over it, more green flames edged with yellow erupting from between her hands. It buffeted her back with pure force, and Draco was forced to try and scurry backwards to avoid the column that roared like fiendfyre. 

Then when Azula hit the ground, she launched herself forwards and planted both fists against his body, one against the thought chakra and the other against the fire chakra. Then, with a cry of anguish, she let loose all the lightning she could, letting it course through his body, making it twist and contort and thrash until bones snapped. And then, when his life’s flame sputtered dangerously close to the point of no return, she let up with the lightning, using her grip to bring her legs into her core, and then kick with both legs directly into his chest, sending his broken body flying.

When Zuko’s rebirth hit the ground, she alighted upon her feet, whispering, “Dojyan!”

His parents--well, Narcissa, at the very least--rushed in to help him, while Lucius walked over, drew his wand, and advanced on Azula. “You little half-blood bitch…!”

Azula straightened, looking the would-be Ozai up and down before speaking. “Advancing on a small child after she’s just won an honour duel? How pathetic. And gutless. Honourlessness must be punished, don’t you think, my Lord of Malfoy?”

“I’ll show you what happens when you lay your hands on your betters!”

“And  _ there’s  _ the fear. It’s nice to know a new world and a new life cannot make you change for the better, Lucius,” replied Azula.

“What are you  _ talking  _ about?!” he roared.

Azula merely checked her nails as he spoke. “Worry not, Daddy Dearest, I’ll give you something of a memento. A reminder, if you will.”

With that, Azula rushed Lucius, and, with a single, clean punch, drove bright green and yellow fire into his face. He dodged at the exact moment she expected him to, leaving him with a burn along the left side of his visage. She meant for it to be identical to the burn he left on Zuko’s face, but all too soon he was on the ground, twisting and thrashing as he screamed as though his very soul was ablaze.

It was then that Helen clawed her way back to the surface, and felt the flame of Draco’s life guttering out, his heartbeat having stopped. Knowing she had a responsibility, she walked briskly up to the boy and stomped on his chest savagely, sending lightning coursing through his body directly into his heart, causing it to jolt back to life. She looked to Narcissa, who scrambled back with fear and terror in her eyes, and sighed. “Sorry. Lost my temper there.”

With that, she turned on her heel and left for the Floo of the Malfoy Estate. She did not run. Her eyes burned because of the smoke, not tears.

Princesses of the Fire Nation didn’t cry.

* * *

When Severus Snape, ne Iroh, looked up from his potions experiments, he did not expect to see his niece rush past him, slamming the door behind her. Fearing the worst, he Flooed over to Malfoy Manor. Immediately upon his feet hitting the ground, he realised his mistake, but by then it was too late. There was Narcissa rushing to him, gibbering about how that “horrible girl” had challenged her Zuko to an honour duel, and then after beating him to within an inch of his life, mutilated her husband. Now, were this the past, Iroh would have assumed that Azula lost control of her limited sanity and lashed out. These days, Severus knew that Azula had been provoked, and likely during a moment of purest emotional distress. Sane or not, Azula, for all her newfound wisdom, was still a very troubled young lady, to put it lightly. 

Still, he agreed to see Lucius and his godson. One look at how the damage was progressing in Lucius’s face let him know this was no ordinary flame. Taking a sample and testing it, the flesh seemed more like it had been charred by some combination of fiendfyre and the Killing Curse, tearing a part of the soul from the body and sublimating it as fuel to continue burning. It seemed that Voldemort’s Killing Curse must have fundamentally changed the flame of Azula’s, now Helen’s, life.

Then when he went to see Draco, the boy looked around, and asked, “W…where am I? Where’s Mai? Izumi, dear, where are you?”

Heart breaking a little, Severus sat next to the boy, letting his voice slip into a more gravelly tone. “Hello, Zuko. Would you like some tea?”  
His gamble paid off. “U…Uncle Iroh?!”

“That was a foolish thing you did, my nephew. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Wait, what?!” cried Zuko’s rebirth.

“It seems your sister was kind enough to restore your memories.”

“Wait, Azula’s here?!”

“Not anymore,” said Severus. “Your sister is a troubled girl, Zuko. You must take care not to provoke her.”

“I thought she was insane,” replied Zuko.

Severus shook his head. “She is haunted by specters more terrible than you or I could ever begin to understand. Not the least of which being how I failed her. How  _ we  _ failed her, leaving her to Ozai.”

“What  _ happened  _ to her?”

“That is not my story to tell, I’m afraid,” he sighed. 

“Are you sure she wasn’t lying? Azula always lies, doesn’t she?”

“Azula lied, I think, because she had nothing of her own, nothing to believe in. Now that there is the fire of belief in her eyes, I don’t think she’s prone to compulsive lying,” replied Severus. “Especially not about… _ this. _ ”

“Oh,  _ Agni… _ ” said Zuko, burying his face in his hands. “What about my father?”

“Lucius might be fine. He might not be. It is likely to be touch and go for some time into the future, given that the Soul Arts are illegal in Britain, and indeed, in most of the Continent. He’ll have to go to Tibet or Japan to get proper treatment, and knowing Lucius, he’d rather die than submit to the touch of a foreigner upon him,” Severus sighed. “Having said all of that, it’s likely he’ll die if not given proper attention from a soul artist. The Killing Curse in Azula’s fire, it’s consuming itself, and the fiendfyre is feeding off of his soul to continue burning. No spell in the British Isles, the Continent, or Albus Dumbledore can save his life now.”

“I… How do we fix this?”

Severus smiled at his nephew, because now, no matter how much Lucius worked to poison his mind, he was still  _ his nephew,  _ was still  _ Zuko _ , perhaps to the same extent that Helen was still Azula, no matter how much she didn’t want to admit it. And to Zuko, no matter what Azula did, she was still his sister in a way that Ozai would never again be his father. “Did you know, Zuko, that Azula has loved your wife Mai since she was small? And, further, that Mai has been reborn as the lovely Miss Parkinson?”

Draco’s eyes went wide at that. “I…oh. I fucked up…”

“Not irreparably, I’d wager, but yes, you have,” replied Severus. “But so has she. Azula doesn’t understand the feelings racing through her, and given time, they’ll drag her right back down into madness, and then we will have  _ truly  _ lost her. She believes, I think, in her heart of hearts, that she is not  _ worthy  _ of love. That lies squarely at all of our feet. We forgot that no matter how strong, powerful, or volatile she was, she was still a  _ child. _ ”

“I’ll break off the betrothal with Pansy immediately.”

“ _No!_ That will only further make Miss Parkinson hate Helen.”  
“Then what do we do, Uncle?” Zuko asked, and an exasperation several decades too old for his five year old face twisted it into contorted shapes. “How do we save Azula?”

“We must get out of her way, I’m afraid, and let Azula figure this out on her own. Our meddling is too certain to backfire. After all, what would we, two men, know about how two women might come to love one another?”

Zuko chuckled at that.

* * *

Later that night, Severus returned home, and he heard the muggle jazz song  _ Caravan  _ blaring throughout the building. He followed the sound of the music, and opened the door to the room beyond which the song was playing loudest, and saw Azula doing clap push ups. Sweat beaded down her brow, even though the room was as cold as a meat locker. Horrified, he swept over to her and picked her up, setting her down on the bed. She froze, stiffened, and deadweighted at first, until she noticed it was him and not Ozai.

“It is unwise to exercise  _ too  _ vigorously when one is young, especially not the kind of exercise to build muscle,” remarked Severus. “Wait here, and don’t move.”

Helen didn’t nod. Didn’t react. She sat there motionlessly and stared right through him. Knowing that this was worse than he thought, he dashed back upstairs to his potions cooler and sorted through them. He knew that Madam Pomfrey at Hogwarts would have his hide for not immediately bringing her to Saint Mungo’s, but there were too many unanswered questions about the state of her body just then, too many questions he knew he would be expected to be able to reply intelligently to.

He brought with him a potion meant to ease the early onset of epiphyseal muscular issues related to overtaxing muscles, a potion meant to soothe hypertonia, and a nutrient potion, bringing them down with him and into Helen’s room. Helen was still there, still staring through the wall. He opened her mouth and fed her the potions one by one, and the nutrient potion went last, because he was certain a five-year-old runaway, even one such as Helen, knew little to nothing about a proper balanced diet. Such a thing was never a problem in the old world, but in this new world, with the European and American fascination with meats and livestock products when it came to nutrition, the phrase ‘food is fuel’ that Azula tended to spout would now only cause her problems with her development later in life.

He ran through all of this in his head as a way to keep down his rising panic at finding Helen in this exercising stupour. He knelt before her, and brought her head down to eye level with his, before seeing her eyes begin to try to well up with tears; and yet, the tear tracks down her face, copious as they were, seemed only to point to having cried herself dry. He left again and procured distilled water--a necessity for a potions master--and a bag of saline, and began to carefully mix the two. He usually trusted his deft fingers, but now it was too important to make a mistake. He brought the concoction down the stairs to her room, and then made her drink it. She was still there, still staring, like an automaton.

The one question she asked broke his heart.

“Why does nobody love me?”

* * *

Madam Poppy Pomfrey knew to expect the unexpected as she did her Sabbatical at Saint Mungo’s during the dead of winter, when the students were cared for by another healer. She expected drunken accidents, the results of drunken brawls, drunken splinching--drunken  _ something.  _ What she was most certainly  _ not  _ expecting was to see her contemptible colleague, Potions Master Professor Severus Snape, rushing into the hospital, dragging a five-year old girl with him. She moved to intercept, and it didn’t take her long before she was standing right in front of him. “ _ What  _ in Merlin Emrys’s name are you  _ doing,  _ Severus? And who is this girl?”

“Her name is Helen… She’s my niece,” replied Severus.

“I didn’t know you had siblings, let alone a niece,” remarked Poppy, crossing her arms over her chest.

“And neither does Dumbledore, so I hope your Hippocratic Oaths are worth more than wind,” he snapped. “She needs a psychomancer. Immediately.”

“Mind-healer.”

“ _ What? _ ”

“They’re called ‘mind-healers,’ Severus.”

“What?!” cried Snape. “Since  _ when?! _ ”

“Four years ago, when the war ended and they stopped being used for interrogations,” replied the healer. “You  _ really  _ don’t keep up with the times, do you, Severus?”

“Whatever they’re called, she needs one,” replied Snape. “She’s been almost catatonic all day.”

Poppy sighed, but let the mask of a healer slip over her emotions. “Come with me, then. I assume you expect this to come out of Hogwarts’ account with the hospital?”

“No, actually,” replied Severus. “I’ll pay for it out of pocket.”

This startled Poppy. “Severus, you’re not independently wealthy…”

“Poppy,” he said. “She is  _ my  _ niece.  _ My  _ responsibility. And I will  _ not  _ have her coming to the notice of Albus  _ or  _ the Board of Governors.”

“What have you gotten yourself into, Severus?” asked Poppy. But then she was Healer Pomfrey once more, and it all bled away. She walked over to the girl and knelt down to look at her, see if Severus was having her on. He didn’t seem the type, but… 

And there it was. The girl was looking right  _ through  _ her. Like her mind was a thousand miles and millennia more away. “What potions has she taken?”

“A nutritional potion, a muscle relaxant and a hypertonia soothing solution. She had been doing push-ups for hours before I found out. I thought it would be prudent.”  
“Severus, you should have brought her here immediately when you found her. You have no experience with…”

“Actually, I have quite a bit of experience looking after lost souls,” replied Severus.

Poppy gave Severus a hard glare. “We’ll have to discuss your  _ extracurricular activities _ later, Severus. Right now, this girl is our priority.”

“Thank you, Poppy,” replied Severus. “She is beyond my ability to help at the moment.”

Pomfrey nodded, and brought the girl into Saint Mungo’s proper. She brought them to the psychomancy wing, and plopped her down in front of the head mind-healer.

“Healer Pomfrey, what…?”

“Save it, Hannibal. The girl needs your help.”

“So it would seem,” replied Healer Barca, taking his slender silver lime wand, eleven inches in length, and pointing it directly at the girl’s forehead. “ _ Legilimens… _ ”

They were locked in stasis for about ninety seconds before the mind-healer collapsed back onto the table. “What was  _ done  _ to that girl?!”

“Far too much,” replied Severus. “Rest assured that the man who did these things to her is, for all intents and purposes, dead.”

“That’s a relief,” replied the mind-healer.

“ _ Hannibal! _ ” cried Poppy.

“You haven’t seen the inside of that child’s head.  _ Everything  _ in there is on fire,” said Healer Barca. “And I  _ don’t  _ recommend finding out what else is going on.

“I cannot help her,” the mind-healer said before turning to Severus. “The best option would be to put her into a magically-induced coma. Like with the Longbottoms.”

“Not an option,” replied Severus curtly.

“And why on earth not?” asked Poppy, crossing her arms again.

Severus sighed. “I hoped I could avoid this…”

With that, he strode over to her, and pulled her bangs back over her forehead.

And suddenly, it all made sense.

“Your  _ niece _ is  _ Helen Potter?! _ ”

“She’s struggling with a reincarnation-related matter,” replied Severus. “As am I. Believe me, she  _ is  _ my niece.  _ I  _ am her next-of-kin, and I will hear no contests to the contrary.”

“Well, if she’s dealing with a past life, we really  _ can’t  _ do anything,” said Hannibal. “That’s more than mere psychomancy. That’s Soul Arts.”

A pin would have echoed in the deafening silence of the room.

“The…Soul Arts,” replied Poppy slowly.

“Animancy, more properly,” said Healer Barca. “Driven out of Europe by the Inquisition centuries ago. Now only practised in East Asia and select places in Africa.”

“I question your credentials, Healer Barca…”

“Well, you shouldn’t,” the young man snapped right back at Poppy. “Reincarnation is one of the few natural phenomena with which, and pardon my Latin,  _ thou shalt not fuck. Any  _ application of psychomancy beyond pure diagnostics is going to drive both healer and patient incurably mad. And that’s the  _ best-case _ scenario.” 

“So, what do we do?” asked Severus, his voice a little desperate.

“We must follow procedure when it comes to catatonia. Fluids, intravenous feeding, copious quantities of laudanum. The works,” replied Mind Healer Barca.

“I can take care of that. How long should it be until she comes out of it?” replied Severus.

“No way to tell. Could be a fortnight. Could be a year.” Hannibal shrugged. “Only an animancer would be able to give you an even remotely close estimate. The illness does not reside in her mind. It has poisoned her very soul.

“Tread carefully, Severus Snape. Mistakes may be… _ costly. _ ”

* * *

All in all, it took four very harrowing days for Helen to finally awaken. It wasn’t until day three that Zuko could come and visit, but he stayed both day three and day four, until as night fell and the sun rose on the fifth day, Helen awoke from her catatonia.

“Are you…”

“Water,” she interrupted.

Zuko nodded and dutifully got her one of the pots of saline-infused quadruple-distilled water that Severus had been making whenever he could tear himself away from Helen’s side. Zuko began to lift the jug to her mouth before she snatched it out of his hands and decanted it entirely down her throat in one go. “Come now, Zuzu. I’m hardly made of glass.”

“Y...you know?!”

“Of course I do.”

“How?”

“Would you believe me if I said ‘sibling’s intuition’? I thought not. Oh well. Here goes.” She scooted up. “The flame of your life burns much differently now. The light of your soul is identical to what it was the day you married Mai.”

“You were there?”

“Of  _ course  _ I was,” snapped Helen. “That was the day I decided I had had enough and left. And not a day goes by when the image of my best friend kissing my  _ brother  _ is not seared into the flesh of my inner eyelid.”

“You loved her, I know.”

“Loved her?” Helen snorted in a very Azula-like way. “I  _ adored  _ her. But she never so much as  _ glanced  _ my way. It’s for the best, though. I doubt she could have loved me even if she had tried.”

“Azula…”

“Don’t  _ ‘Azula’  _ me, Zuko! Even Ursa believed I was a monster. Every word she ever said to me is poison.” Helen sighed. “The German muggle philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that hope is the greatest of evils, for it only prolongs human suffering. I am inclined to agree with him.”

Zuko looked as though he was about to respond, but instead, in came Severus, carrying a full tea set upon its silver surface. 

Placing it down on the bedside table, he poured Helen a porcelain cup, and handed it over to Helen. She downed it, then coughed. “Lotus root?!”

“I took the liberty of procuring some while I was out today,” replied Severus, his face and posture so Iroh-like that Zuko swore he was seeing double. “I hope I prepared it well.”

Helen coloured, before hiding her mouth behind the teacup and saying, “...Acceptably.”

Both of the others, man and boy, laughed uproariously at that.

It wasn’t until midday that Helen was back outside, walking through the streets of Diagon Alley for the first time in her life. They turned onto Nocturne, to stop at Borgin and Burke’s to stock up on some rarer and more dubiously legal potions supplies. Helen liked Nocture a lot better than she liked Diagon. Diagon was a bit too romanticised, too sanitised for her tastes. Nocture seemed to be where most of the actual business got done, and where the more specialised amongst them peddled their wares.

A quick stop at Gringotts, and they suddenly had the funds to stop at Madam Arachne’s for some proper robes for Helen. If she was going to be living in the wizarding world, she might as well have them. Predictably, she chose short-cut robes, more suited to a boy in the archaic estimation of the Wizarding World--the cut was designed to be battle-ready, the same as her Fire Princess robes she wore under her armour. 

Having neither the ability nor the inclination to seek that a wand be made, they instead bought books on every subject from divination to arithmancy, Helen being thunderstruck by this new discipline called ‘magic,’ even though she had no use for the wand-waving elements. She, unlike Zuko, could fight her own battles without a weapon to act as a constant tell. She picked up a set of Tarot cards from Madam Nadya’s on Nocturne Alley, and a book that instructed her in their use. 

Slipping into muggle London, then, while Severus and Zuko were eating lunch and drinking tea, Helen picked up quite a bit of sheet music, as well as books on modern music theory and composition. She wanted to woo Mai, and an idea was growing, a plot forming and coalescing in the darker recesses of her mind. She also stumbled upon a folio of the works of a certain muggle poet and playwright. Why anyone would name themselves after a tribal method of aggression was beyond her, but perhaps there was some method in it.

The folio she got them packed in were secreted away as she slipped into the Leaky Cauldron, ready to return home. Her uncle and her brother were engaged in vigorous discussion. About what, she did not know, nor could she find the inclination to learn. Instead, she ordered the lightest thing she could, knowing how much grease went into British food from cooking it for the Dursleys since she was three years old. The tea was not very good at all--she knew that black tea had been catching on in Republic City before she died, known for its relatively inexpensive manufacture and sale, and for its ease of brewing. You stuck a bag in boiling water, waited three minutes, and voila. Yet another reason to be glad that she never lived in that cesspit, where culture and good taste went to die. She asked for green tea, and got a similar tea bag filled with chopped and processed leaves, the sort of which was popular in Ba Sing Se and Omashu, but was never really to her tastes even when she finally caved and got into the brewing of tea, as she had told her uncle, more out of necessity than hobby.

“Is it really so difficult to get decent tea here?” she hissed. “Must I begin carrying a tea set with me wherever I go, whenever I go to eat?”

Iroh nodded his head sagely, and Zuko looked at them both like they were insane. What she had was a broth made from stock, and a cottage pie. There was so much starch in that that she felt herself almost about to burst. It was then that she decided she had to go shopping for groceries sooner or later, if she wanted to keep a proper diet. She could feel herself being smothered by the greasy and sauced, tough and uniformly grey-hued meats. She was certain that Vernon would have turned puce to have her complain in such a fashion; such a thought made her laugh. At least the Dursleys only beat and starved her, after all. For that, she was grateful.

They finished their food and paid, and then made their way back to the building where the Jade Dragon was housed. Sighing and entering her room, she plopped her muggle items down, and first chose the folio of the works of that muggle. Swing-sword or something.

Time escaped her, and by time night fell, her eyes were straining to consume another word. She read through fully half the folio, and by the time she forced herself to put it down to consider supper, she was hooked, truly and fully enthralled by the works of William Shakespeare in that moment. She rushed down to the Jade Dragon, only to see a large number of women in various states of clothing sitting and enjoying a pot of tea. And a more colourful assemblage she could not have imagined. 

She ate her dinner in the corner. It was hot-pot, given the season--eel, boiled and chopped with a precision one would only expect of a potions master, fried octopus, thick wheat noodles, and a side of raw tuna with steamed rice. She chuckled to herself at how much her uncle must have quibbled over just how much mercury-infused fish to give her, and she knew it would be a painful experience to force the toxins out of her body, but when it was prepared in such a fashion that, despite herself, it made her homesick, longing for the halcyon days she spent with her friends after having hunted down the Avatar, she found that she was able to eat it all without the slightest complaint.

When she finally put her chopsticks down, she washed the entire mixture down with boiled miso broth, so as to wipe away the metallic aftertaste of the meal.

“May I sit here?”

Helen looked up and saw a copper-skinned, dark-haired girl, maybe fifteen years old, dressed in what looked to be a cocktail dress and strappy heels far too tall for her, and nodded. She had little intention of discussing her life with one of her uncle’s strays, but she could do with some company, she supposed.

“So. Shakespeare. Some pretty heavy reading for a girl your age. Six? Seven?”

“Five,” said Helen with just a hint of irritation as she picked the folio back up and began to read through it. “But I’m older than I look.”

“Aren’t we all,” the girl replied with a chuckle. “So, what’s your story? Orphan? Runaway? Both?”

When Helen looked up at the last, the girl smiled and nodded. “I see. Both.”

“Is there a point to this line of questioning?” asked Helen with an exasperated tone.

“Well, your uncle Severus mentioned that you’d be interested in music lessons. Is that true?”

“It may be,” Helen said at length.

She smiled. “And if I said dancing lessons would be included?”

“I’d ask what the catch is,” replied Helen, putting down the folio and pushing it slightly to the side.

“No catch. I just… I need a place to stay.”

Helen nodded sagely. “And you didn’t ask my uncle because…?”

“Because he said that if I wanted to teach you, you’d have to agree first. He doesn’t seem to want to make you do anything you don’t want to do. Unlike most men.”

Helen snorted at that. “Truer words were rarely spoken.”

“My birth name’s Esmeralda. But in my line of work, I go by the stage name ‘Justine.’”

“Then I suppose it’s nice to meet you, Justine,” replied Helen, reaching out and taking her hand and shaking it. “I look forward to learning from you.”

“And I look forward to teaching you,” said Justine, giggling to herself. “I can tell we’re going to have  _ so much fun. _ ”

Helen smiled right back at her. “Likewise.”

Justine nodded with a smile on her face. “Let me get my things. We’ll start with the dawn, if that’s okay with you?”

“I’m always up with the dawn,” replied Helen.

“A rare quality for one your age.”

“So I’m told,” said Helen, draining the last of her tea to the dregs. “I’m sorry, you remind me of someone I once...”  _ tried to kill  _ “...knew.”

“Knew in the Biblical sense?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t mind it. It’s an old joke,” replied Justine.

Helen decided to take the risk. “Does the name ‘Katara’ mean anything to you?”

Justine put her finger against her lip, and thought for a moment. “Katara. Sounds Inuit. So no, it doesn’t. I’m Romany.”

“Interesting…” said Helen.

“Hopefully not  _ too  _ interesting,” replied Justine.

“Indeed. Well, see you tomorrow morning?”

“Of course,” said Justine, mussing Helen’s hair before she left.

It took several minutes of Helen sitting there, dumbstruck, for her to move again.

No one had  _ ever  _ mussed her hair before.

Maybe…

…Maybe there  _ was  _ something to this ‘hope’ thing, after all… 


End file.
